This section is intended to provide a background to the various embodiments of the invention that are described in this disclosure. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and/or claims of this disclosure and is not admitted to be prior art by the mere inclusion in this section.
Diverse applications or services are supposed to be provided by the next generation mobile networks, such as the 5th Generation (5G) networks. It is expected that 5G networks will support emerging use cases with a high variety of applications and variability of their performance attributes, from delay-sensitive video applications to ultra-low latency, from high speed entertainment applications in a vehicle to mobility on demand for connected objects, and from best effort applications to reliable and ultra-reliable ones such as health and safety. Furthermore, diverse use cases will be delivered across a wide range of devices (e.g., smartphones, wearable devices, vehicle-mounted devices, Machine-Type Communications (MTC)) and across a fully heterogeneous environment.
Different use cases may put different requirements to future networks. For example, acceptable interruption time, reliability and availability, acceptable latency, data rate, as well as cost per user. It would be quite difficult or cost impossible to deploy a common network to fulfill such extremely diverse requirements. To resolve the problem, the concept of network slices is proposed to fulfill diverse requirements from various use cases. A network slice may support the communication services of a particular connection type with a specific way of handling control plane and user plane for the services. It is expected that there would be many different type of network slices for different usage in the networks. At same time, from practical business perspective, due to resource restriction or business limitation, it is possible that certain type of network slice is not available in certain area or at certain time while it may be available in another area or another time. In different area or different operators, different network slice services may be provided.
Therefore, there is a need to provide solutions for redistributing user traffic between network slices.